Pitchmarks #28 - 14th January 2024 - "Between The Pulpit & The Putter"

“A man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth”
Charles Darwin

So ingrained are the early starts, borne of a blissful spell as a greenkeeper now two decades away, that to leave before the clock strikes six is nothing out of the ordinary. The roads are empty, and as I edge closer to Rye, my route straddling some notional border between Sussex and Kent, I cannot wait for the darkness to lift; for my field of vision to once again rest on the gently waving marram grass, and the delicious fairways it frames.

This place has become precious to me, in the way that Moonlight Sonata is, or Playing the Like, or the Basingstoke Canal. Landmarks in my journey; reference points when I need a hard reset. But today, I shall not play at Rye, but only watch. And as I park up on the side of the road to Camber, adjacent to the opening hole, I have some sense that I need this passive time, that I must stay detached, and quiet, today. I need to walk, and think, and walk again.

I make strong coffee on a gas stove, and drink it while peering through the van window at the first few pairs as they negotiate that gentle incline to the first green and then move right to face the demands of the second. On another day - perhaps when I am playing here - there’d be a chance some wild hook might cross the road and reach the van, but today’s golf is played by far straighter hitters than I, for it is the annual meeting of the Oxford & Cambridge Golfing Society, for Blues light and dark.

The knockout contestants battle in scratch matchplay for the right to see their winning ball hang from the hickory shaft of the fourth edition of The President’s Putter - simply “The Putter” to those for whom this winter sojourn is an annual rite of passage. I am here to observe it, for it appeals to me in a thousand different ways, but as I drain my camping mug and step out into an icy wind, I am not ready to talk to people and so turn left instead of right, and head down towards the Channel.

A path swings up and into the dunes between the club’s land and Camber Sands, a glorious stretch of golden beach that basks in shafts of morning sunlight. From here, the links are the other side of an impenetrable wedge of sea buckthorn, and I alternate my loving gaze between the cold horizon of the ocean to my left and that magnificent sliver of golf out right. Along the shore, curlews pick at the shallows and now and then the whistle of an oystercatcher breaks the wind’s steady beat. High above a kestrel somehow holds its position in the wind while scanning the dunes for motion.

At the harbour’s bank, I turn inland, and peer across both Jubilee and Old from the western flank. Two by two, the players move swiftly across the land, pausing occasionally to swipe at a ball, and there seems, at this distance, a musical rhythm to their transit through Rye’s many honest trials. I slip behind the harbour master’s quarters onto the old tramway, and pass silently in front of the twelfth tee - my only steps on the actual course in these first two hours of my visit - before looping back on the main road to my coffee pot.

To be here and not play is strange, but it feels like this change of perspective is helpful, and that I have my eyes wider this way. The distractions of this maddening game are suspended, and I make a few notes from my circuit of the perimeter. From over by the inlet, I perceived for the first time how mighty, how important, the diagonal ridge is to what Bernard Darwin called “this truly divine spot”, though I struggle to explain it in mere words.

At points, the wind turbines and even the clocktower of the clubhouse disappear behind the many crags and cliffs of golf’s pre-eminent dune, and as the course itself gradually evolved in the shifting sands of this island’s fringe, many of the tees and greens were gently folded into this central motif, as well as the classic holes that play over it. At Rye, the sense of adventure that Darwin so cherished in his prose remains untainted by fashion or time.

I head out again, and this time walk along the ridge, pausing on a bench behind the ninth tee for a while. Here, looking back towards the clubhouse, I can feel the wind that deadens the players’ drives ahead, and see the twin flags of the Club and the Society urgently whipping my way. Somewhere Darwin wrote of the joys of spectating - “a day’s watching can be Elysium on earth” - and I wonder whether this might be the spot on which he sat, “to rest for a while on a bank out of the wind” as the players come through “The Pulpit”, though if that is the case, the wind was certainly pointing a different way that day.

One hundred years ago, he won this event, and his ancient golf ball dangles from the original Putter just a few hundred yards north of here. This most charming of trophies was gifted to the society by its President, John Low, who’d no doubt bristle at the timeline of the ball’s evolution laid bare under each warped shaft. Low railed against the ball back then, and on that battle still rages, but I like to imagine that most cerebral of golfers would soften his frustration with delight at the survival of The Putter’s original format and ethos.

Within a few feet of that is Charles Darwin’s old leather chair, but I am thrilled at the thought of the grandson sitting out here instead of in that family heirloom, and thrilled to follow in his footsteps. Thrilled, but also chilled, and so I turn and head south, finding a bank that is “out of the wind”, high and left of the seventh tee.

From here, I watch these amateur masters try and keep their balls on an impossibly firm green, shot after fine shot landing pin high to bounce through despite the softening grade of this green towards the tee. And though these matches are hard-fought, and a ball on the Putter one of golf’s great achievements, from my hidden perch I can sense the spirit in which this golf is played.

Short putts are given, not holed; the players are careful with their shadows when the sun casts its welcome but occasional approval on the day. Opponents chatter, and the sounds on the breeze are of laughter, and appreciation, and the clinking of irons, and now and then of urethane on aluminium. If “a man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth”, then in the friendships that develop here, old and new, something way more important than match results persists. This golf is so simple, and so endlessly refreshing, and as I turn to head back home, I pause at the highest point of Rye’s own little mountain range and soak it all up.

From up here, the specific holes and all their glorious adventure are visible - the impossibly thin profile of the fourteenth green at last revealed to me, for example - but this shift in perspective also brings home to me the fluidity of the course, the genius of the routing. Rye is known for its quirk, and the stubborn, wooden sleepers that defend the right hand side of that fourteenth play havoc with many as I watch, but to focus only on such small details is to miss the bigger picture, and to underestimate just how strong a golf course this is as a whole.

Rye does quirk better than anywhere else, and has plenty of it, but to my mind it also does golf better than anywhere else. Someday I will work out what I’d really like to say about The Putter, but I fear it will pale beside what has already been written - by Bernardo himself and his few spiritual descendents. But in the meantime, another theme leaps out at me from this day of detached observation. For in a couple of days’ time, some lucky soul will exchange their winning ball - whether the final blow is conceded or holed - for a small silver medal upon which “Primus inter pares” has been engraved, ready for their triumph.

“First among equals” is the translation from Latin, and those three words encapsulate perfectly the true amateur spirit in which this event and the Society operates - an increasingly rare mode of sporting generosity. But for me - as I sing my heart out all the way home, transformed once again by this place and all it stands for - the inscription offers a broader meaning.

Golf has such rich and varied resources to be mined, and I feel blessed to have seen a good few of the other divine places we golfers dream of when night falls. But Rye itself is never anything less than “first among equals” to me, and so I conveniently “forget” to pick up my jacket from the office, in order that I may once again look forward to another day in and around “The Pulpit”. In and around “Elysium”. With or without my sticks.